Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology - uncopy

eferential. What art shows in such a manifestation is, indeed, how it functions. This is revealed
in works which feign to say, but do so as an art proposition and reveal the difference (while
showing their similarity) with language. This was, of course, the role of language in my work
beginning in 1965. It seemed to me that if language itself could be used to function as an
artwork, then that difference would bare the device of art’s language game. An artwork then, as
such a double mask, provided the possibility of not just a reflection on itself, but an indirect
double reflection on the nature of language, through art, to culture itself. “Do not forget,”writes
Wittgenstein, “that a poem, even though it is composed in the language of information is not
used in the language-game of giving information.”Whatever insights this early work of mine had
to share, it did, and it initiated within the practice an essential questioning process which is
now basic to it. It should be obvious that the “baring of the device”of the institutions of art
would begin at the most elemental level: the point of production itself, the artwork. Seeing the
artwork, in such a context, forced a scrutiny of its conventions and historical baggage, such as
the painting/sculpture dichotomy. First inside the frame and then outside. One goal of a work
such as The Second Investigation, 1968 was to question the institutional forms of art. If the
work that preceded this confronted the institutionalized form of authority of traditional art, this
work pressed the point out of the gallery and museum into the world, using public media.
4. See Deborah Zafman, “Joseph Kosuth’s Passagen-Werk (Documenta-Flânerie): An Installation
of Ideas,”M. A. thesis (Berkeley: University of California, 1994).
5. Ad Reinhardt painted black paintings. But anyone who knew him, who knew how he thought
about art, would tell you that he was more than just a producer of paintings; he was a producer
of meaning. It is this total activity as an artist which ultimately provided those paintings with a
cultural life as it preserved Reinhardt’s reasons for making them, which you see when you look
at them. By his ceaseless participation in panel discussions, his lectures, his texts such as
“Rules for a New Academy,”his teaching, and his cartoons, he made it very difficult for others
to co-opt his work for their own purposes. Indeed, his work had to resist a critical atmosphere in
which work that was outside of a certain orthodoxy was either made to fit, or was dismissed. The
limits of Clement Greenberg’s vision are probably witnessed with no greater clarity than in his
statement on Reinhardt, that he “has a genuine if small gift for color but none at all for design
or placing”(quoted in the regrettable text of Yve-Alain Bois, “The Limit of Almost,”in Ad Reinhardt,
exhibition catalogue [New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1991], p. 18).
6. In the context of such a practice, I see an insurmountable contradiction for those colleagues
of mine who have permitted art historians and critics to provide the theoretical basis for their
work. What is thus brought into question is the very grounds of its authenticity.
joseph kosuth intention(s) 467